quarta-feira, 1 de julho de 2015

“Hope” is the thing with feather (BY EMILY DICKINSON)

I have
nothing concerning TESOL to share with you guys today. I am really busy at this
very moment. The only thing I would like to show you today is this beautiful
poem written by Emily Dickinson.

“Hope” is
the thing with feathers
(BY EMILY DICKINSON)

“Hope” is
the thing with feathers -
That perches in the soul -And sings the tune without the words -And never stops - at all -

And
sweetest - in the Gale - is heard -
And sore must be the storm -
That could abash the little Bird
That kept so many warm -

I’ve
heard it in the chillest land -
And on the strangest Sea -
Yet - never - in Extremity,
It asked a crumb - of me.

Summary

The speaker describes hope as a bird (“the thing with
feathers”) that perches in the soul. There, it sings wordlessly and without
pause. The song of hope sounds sweetest “in the Gale,” and it would require a
terrifying storm to ever “abash the little Bird / That kept so many warm.” The
speaker says that she has heard the bird of hope “in the chillest land— / And
on the strangest Sea—”, but never, no matter how extreme the conditions, did it
ever ask for a single crumb from her.

(

SparkNotes)

Like almost all of Dickinson’s poems, “‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers—...” takes the form of an iambic trimeter that often
expands to include a fourth stress at the end of the line (as in “And sings the
tune without the words—”). Like almost all of her poems, it modifies and breaks
up the rhythmic flow with long dashes indicating breaks and pauses (“And never
stops—at all—”). The stanzas, as in most of Dickinson’s lyrics, rhyme loosely
in an ABCB scheme, though in this poem there are some incidental carryover
rhymes: “words” in line three of the first stanza rhymes with “heard” and
“Bird” in the second; “Extremity” rhymes with “Sea” and “Me” in the third
stanza, thus, technically conforming to an ABBB rhyme scheme.

(

SparkNotes)

Commentary

This simple, metaphorical description of hope as a
bird singing in the soul is another example of Dickinson’s homiletic style,
derived from Psalms and religious hymns. Dickinson introduces her metaphor in
the first two lines (“‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers— / That perches in the soul—”), then develops it throughout the poem by telling
what the bird does (sing), how it reacts to hardship (it is unabashed in the
storm), where it can be found (everywhere, from “chillest land” to “strangest
Sea”), and what it asks for itself (nothing, not even a single crumb). Though
written after “Success is counted sweetest,” this is still an early poem for
Dickinson, and neither her language nor her themes here are as complicated and
explosive as they would become in her more mature work from the mid-1860s.
Still, we find a few of the verbal shocks that so characterize Dickinson’s
mature style: the use of “abash,” for instance, to describe the storm’s
potential effect on the bird, wrenches the reader back to the reality behind
the pretty metaphor; while a singing bird cannot exactly be “abashed,” the word
describes the effect of the storm—or a more general hardship—upon the speaker’s
hopes. (

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